Thursday, April 15, 2010

There He Goes Again: Mann Claims His Hockey Stick was Given "Clean Bill of Health"

Spinmeister Michael Mann is quoted in this article from the Telegraph yesterday as follows:

Prof Hand (Head of the UK Royal Statistical Society) praised the blogger Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit for uncovering the fact that inappropriate methods were used which could produce misleading results. "The Mann 1998 hockey stick paper used a particular technique that exaggerated the hockey stick effect," he said.

Prof Mann, who is Professor of Earth System Science at the Pennsylvania State University, said the statistics used in his graph were correct. "I would note that our '98 article was reviewed by the US National Academy of Sciences, the highest scientific authority in the United States, and given a clean bill of health," he said. "In fact, the statistician on the panel, Peter Bloomfield, a member of the Royal Statistical Society, came to the opposite conclusion of Prof Hand."

Mann has been repeating this arrogant duplicitous spin continuously since Climategate and refuses to acknowledge any problems whatsoever with his infamous doomsday hockey stick graph. Mann always refers to the subtly worded US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report as his ally because he knows McIntyre & McKitrick, the Wegman Report, Hans von Storch, et al, and now the Head of the Royal Statistical Society have minced no words debunking his hockey stick. But what did the NAS report and the authors actually say about the Mann hockey stick? In fact, the NAS report validated all of the significant criticisms of McIntyre & McKitrick (M&M):1. The NAS indicated that the hockey stick method systematically underestimated the uncertainties in the data (p. 107).
2. In subtle wording, the NAS agreed with the M&M assertion that the hockey stick had no statistical significance, and was no more informative about the distant past than a table of random numbers. The NAS found that Mann's methods had no validation (CE) skill significantly different from zero. In the past, however, it has always been claimed that the method has a significant nonzero validation skill. Methods without a validation skill are usually considered useless. Mann’s data set does not have enough information to verify its ‘skill’ at resolving the past, and has such wide uncertainty bounds as to be no better than the simple mean of the data (p. 91). M&M said that the appearance of significance was created by ignoring all but one type of test score, thereby failing to quantify all the relevant uncertainties. The NAS agreed (p. 110), but, again, did so in subtle wording.

3. M&M argued that the hockey stick relied for its shape on the inclusion of a small set of invalid proxy data (called bristlecone, or “strip-bark” records). If they are removed, the conclusion that the 20th century is unusually warm compared to the pre-1450 interval is reversed. Hence the conclusion of unique late 20th century warmth is not robust—in other word it does not hold up under minor variations in data or methods. The NAS panel agreed, saying Mann’s results are “strongly dependent” on the strip-bark data (pp. 106-107), and they went further, warning that strip-bark data should not be used in this type of research (p. 50).

4. The NAS said " Mann et al. used a type of principal component analysis that tends to bias the shape of the reconstructions", i.e. produce hockey sticks from baseball statistics, telephone book numbers, and monte carlo random numbers.

5. The NAS said Mann downplayed the "uncertainties of the published reconstructions...Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that ‘the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium.’

Mann never mentions that a subsequent House Energy and Commerce Committee report chaired by Edward Wegman totally destroyed the credibility of the ‘hockey stick’ and devastatingly ripped apart Mann’s methodology as ‘bad mathematics’. Furthermore, when Gerald North, the chairman of the NAS panel -- which Mann claims ‘vindicated him’ – and panel member Peter Bloomfield who Mann says above came to the opposite conclusions as Prof Hand, were asked at the House Committee hearings whether or not they agreed with Wegman’s harsh criticisms, they said they did:

CHAIRMAN BARTON. Dr. North, do you dispute the conclusions or the methodology of Dr. Wegman’s report?

DR. NORTH. No, we don’t. We don’t disagree with their criticism. In fact, pretty much the same thing is said in our report.

DR. BLOOMFIELD. Our committee reviewed the methodology used by Dr. Mann and his co-workers and we felt that some of the choices they made were inappropriate. We had much the same misgivings about his work that was documented at much greater length by Dr. Wegman.

WALLACE: ‘the two reports were complementary, and to the extent that they overlapped, the conclusions were quite consistent.’ (Am Stat Assoc.)

3 comments:

Isn't it time that the work of Gerlich & Tscheuschner is given the credit it’s due- The greenhouse gas effect has no scientific bases-it violates fundamental laws of physics. Michal Mann's "forcing' is a fairy tale ,his MANNipulation of temperature data, should be exposed and criminal charges brought against him and the University for not bringing out the truth.List of references:The paper "Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 greenhouse effect within the frame of physics" by Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner is an in-depth examination of the subject. Electronic version of an article published as International Journal of Modern PhysicsB, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2009) 275{364 , DOI No: 10.1142/S021797920904984X, c WorldScientifc Publishing Company, http://www.worldscinet.com/ijmpb.

Report of Alan Carlin of US-EPA March, 2009 that shows that CO2 does not cause global warming.

Greenhouse Gas Hypothesis Violates Fundamentals of Physics” by Dipl-Ing Heinz Thieme This work has about 10 or 12 linkthat support the truth that the greenhouse gas effect is a hoax.

R.W.Wood .Greenhouse Theory Disproved a Century AgoTown Hall ^ | 02/03/09 | reasonmclucus Posted on Tuesday, February 03, 2009 7:15:22 PM by kathsua The claim that carbon dioxide (CO2) can increase air temperatures by "trapping" infrared radiation (IR) ignores the fact that in 1909 physicist R.W. Wood disproved the popular 19th Century thesis that greenhouses stayed warm by trapping IR. Unfortunately, many people who claim to be scientists are unaware of Wood's experiment which was originally published in the Philosophical magazine , 1909, vol 17, p319-320.

www. Strata-Sphere.com » There Is No Atmospheric Green House Effect.mhtThe bottom line is that the facts show that the greenhouse gas effect is a fairy-tale and that Man-made global warming is the World larges Scam!!! The IPCC and Al Gore should be charged under the US Anti-racketeering act and when convicted - they should spend the rest of their lives in jail for the Crimes they have committed against Humanity.

Actually, greenhouse acting as a gas was first proposed by Fourier in mid 19th century and carbon dioxide was fingered by Svante Arrenas in 1896. He was quickly proven wrong by his nemiss, Kunt Angstrom, but given the delay in peer review it took a while for the truth to be verified. The US Monthly Weather Review of June 1901 has article "Knut Angstrom on Atmospheric Absorption" but Svantee, then head of the new Nobel Committee refused to admit his error until 1905.

More on this history in my article "Strange Tale of the Green House Gas Gang" and for a good laugh at the hockey stick maker read "Hockey Stickery Doc"....all posted at a website near you !